Silver Lake, a Los Angeles community a few miles to the east of Hollywood, is best known as a boho mecca of progressive writers, architects, and their reared-on-kale progeny. But what if these people are actually much more conservative than anyone imagines, even along the lines of families in Brentwood or Bel Air? In the excellent film Afternoon Delight, Jill Soloway plumbs the life of an East Side mom, and comes back with a portrait of existential confusion, with shocks to the system sent by elementary-school-parent committees, a weak sex life, and, of course, day in and day out spent in that peculiarly Angeleno prison of the perfect modern home in the hills. The movie, with Kathryn Hahn as mom, Josh Radnor as her husband, and Juno Temple playing the stripper who complicates their beautiful life, is in theaters on August 30th (it premiered at Sundance, with Soloway taking home the festival’s directing award). Get ready for The Yellow Wallpaper: Silver Lake Mom edition …

The Hollywood Blog____: This is an enviable life that Hahn’s character, Rachel, is living.

Jill Soloway: Rachel’s husband’s business just “happened”—he’s one of those people who worked at Tumblr before it got bought, and suddenly some sick amount of money was dropped into their lap. Now there’s $20 million in an account that they know they’re not going to touch, ever, because it’s about the kids, college, retirement. It’s still there if they need it, but they don’t need anything. They built their dream house. She doesn’t have to work. All the pressure was taken off, and now she gets to decide what she wants to do. But that feeling inspired total panic, the feeling of, “If I can do anything, nothing matters.”

The day just passes …

Right. For me, when I’m not working, the day goes by so fast. I never have enough time—getting a manicure, getting a pedicure, getting my workout in, making sure that I ate healthy. Those things can become treacherous to the mind. They can take over, and become your career. You see women at my son’s school wearing those little calorie counters now. There is not one part of the day when they are not in their calorie calculation—their steps are being counted and measured. It’s what they’re doing for the day.

And without anything to do, Rachel’s life, essentially, becomes about having good taste. It's a different way of being a mom than when you grew up, in the 1970s.

I was just in Chicago, walking around the neighborhood that I went to grade school in, and now there’s a Barney’s there. When I grew up, there was no Barney’s. There was no aspiration! There was a Saks, but nobody lived through the idea of Saks. You live through Barney’s Co-op. You define yourself from going to Barney Greengrass and having your brunch, getting the scent and the bag.

And the house. In L.A., you always have to have the perfect house.

Perfection would be something that you see in Architectural Digest. It’s almost harder to achieve the look that everyone wants in Silver Lake—though there’s a version of this movie that could have happened in Pacific Heights, or Cobble Hill with the townhouses, or many other places—which is a slightly imperfect look. The house has to look like it didn’t have a designer, and have a little chaos. It should have a casual, not-paid-for aesthetic, displaying an inborn whimsical taste. Everything’s become about showing your good taste—even when you hang out with other moms, it’s a Pinot Grigio play date, and taste matters with wine, of course.

And yet, in this life of abundance, there’s no sex with her husband.

Unless you’re really working at it, which takes time and energy, a lot of these couples become brother and sister. [I believe in] Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity thing. She talks about how what people really crave in relationship is safety, which is antithetical__ __to sexiness. Rachel and her husband have a lot of safety in the house. They’ve got a housekeeper, the right bed and the right furniture. You have to manufacture friction and lust in that kind of situation. Something that’s specifically Silver Lake is the grown-up adolescence thing that’s going on here. All the parents love games, and art that looks like it was made by kids, and we love our kids so much—we are kids with our kids, you know? We’re in the park playing kickball with other families. Nobody’s French, and with the cigarette, affair, and hotel.

In the end, Afternoon Delight seems like it's about the plight of having too much—a beautiful home, kid, husband, wealth.

It’s about how you meet a guy, you fall in love, you have sex all the time. You have the destination wedding in Big Sur, then a kid, and at first, when the kid's in preschool, you’re so busy—you’re doing everything, you’re never not doing. Then your kid goes to school until 12 P.M. And then he goes to school until 4 P.M. And now you have the whole day to do whatever you want. But you wake up in the middle of the night with your heart pounding, saying, “It’s not enough. We have too much, and it’s still not enough.”